Red Zone

Philly.com Staff

The Eagles will hold a rookie minicamp this weekend from May 16-18 (Fri-Sun). That will be the first opportunity for the new guys to get acclimated to Chip Kelly's world of smoothies and sleep mandates. Here are some Eagles notes:

Pre-draft player visits do indeed matter

Every NFL team is allowed to host 30 non-local players for pre-draft visits. Leading up to the draft, Eagles writers meticulously tried to track what players visited the NovaCare Complex. There were questions whether there was any correlation between player visits and the likelihood of the players who visited the Eagles being drafted by them. In other words, were Eagles reporters wasting a lot of time and energy reporting player visits?

As it turns out, no. Of the 7 players the Eagles drafted, 6 of them visited the Eagles during the pre-draft process.

The only player above who did not visit was Oregon WR Josh Huff, who Chip Kelly already knew.

Why no offensive linemen in the draft?

One of the rare spots on the Eagles' roster where they have some aging players is along their offensive line. Jason Peters and Evan Mathis are both 32, and Todd Herremans is 31. Because of age concerns there, it was expected that the Eagles would reload with some young offensive linemen in the draft. They did not, however, it's understandable why. In the 3rd round, there was a run on offensive linemen, which was kicked off by the Seahawks with the last pick in the 2nd round:

7 of the 19 picks before the Eagles' selection at 83rd overall in the 3rd round were offensive linemen, and one in particular, Nebraska's Spencer Long, was thought to be high on their wish list. The Eagles ended up trading out of the 83rd overall pick, and they selected WR Josh Huff with the 86th overall pick. At that point, the Eagles' next selection, which was the first pick of the 4th round at 101st overall, was 14 picks away. 5 more offensive linemen came off the board in that range.

Colledge would serve as nice short-term depth, but at 32 years old, he won't help the Eagles get any younger along their line. Colledge went to North Pole High School, which is in an area of a Alaska more Alaska'y than your typical Alaskan city. The city of North Pole, AK has an average January high temperature of -1, and an average low of -17, according to weather.com. The coddled wusses in Anchorage, by comparison, enjoy average highs of 22 in January, and average lows of 8.

Josh Huff signs with Eagles

Four days after he was drafted, Eagles rookie WR Josh Huff has already agreed to a contract with the team. Because there isn't much mystery on how much rookies will make based on where they are drafted, the days of rookie holdouts under the new collective bargaining agreement are all but gone. The website overthecap.com does phenomenal job with all things money related in the NFL. Here is how much they project each Eagle draft pick to make: